I took a job at the pool in order to earn the five cents a day it cost to swim. I counted wet towels. As a bonus, I was allowed to swim during lunchtime.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It's not about being rich, but everyone back home has a pool. And I was a total water baby. My mom couldn't get me out - she'd put my dinner plate at the end of the pool, and I'd eat my meals in the water.
My first paying job might have been doing a play, actually. My mom paid me to dress up as a flounder at my sister's 'Little Mermaid' - themed birthday party when I was little.
One summer vacation, I carried water to the town market to sell it, and I used some of the money I made to help a neighbour.
I used to work, part time, in a deli, in those days when your parents made you work just so you should know what work was like. And you'd make 4, 5, 6, ten dollars.
In my grammar school years back in the 1920s I used my ten-cents-a-week allowance for Saturday matinees of Douglas Fairbanks movies. All that swashbuckling and leaping about in the midst of the sails of ships!
Myself and my two younger sisters and brother were paid for any chores, whether it was washing pop's car, sweeping the lawn or picking mangoes.
In this business you either sink or swim or you don't.
My first job was in sixth grade, sweeping the clay tennis courts at the yacht club near my house, which I was not a member of. Always had to pay my own rent. But I don't really have any concept of how money works. I don't know how much things cost. Like a BMW. Or a quart of milk. It's embarrassing.
I was a per diem floater in the same junior high school I went to. I sat in the office and made $42.50 a day, and whenever a teacher was absent, I'd substitute. I taught everything from English to auto shop.
I worked at this place called Water World; it was a waterslide park. My brother and my dad framed my first paycheck from this place - which was for $0.00 dollars - because I didn't even make enough to cover the cost of my uniform!